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back to article Gartner gurus: Storage array market GREW at the end of 2013

Number-crunchers Gartner's external storage market gurus reckoned it returned to year-on-year growth in the last quarter of fiscal 2013. According to Gartner: “Worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage vendor revenue totalled $6.3bn in the fourth quarter of 2013, a five per cent increase from $6.0bn a year ago.” …

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  1. BillG
    Meh

    Always Wrong

    Has Gartner ever been right about anything????

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  2. TrustMeIamWithHim

    Unbelievable how Clustered Ontap has been gaining ground!?! We did the migration from 7 mode to cDOT and it was a disaster!

    The lure of all those juicy Netapp features in a single box were strong, but in reality it is a insane danger to put all your eggs in the same basket.

    Clustered ONTAP can not even replicate synchronously like competing products from EMC and HDS.

    Don't get me wrong here, we have been a Netapp house for about 10 years ! (6.4) but clustered ontap is a big fail and I am disappointed by Netapp.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      @ TrustMeIamWithHim

      Plan and execute the cDOT migration and all works well.

      Synchronous replication will be along shortly.

      NetApp house for similar no. years to you, still happy and whilst other vendors have bridged some of the NetApp gap, FAS is still the best workhorse and the only proper unified platform on the market.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Unbelievable how Clustered Ontap has been gaining ground!?!

      TrustMeIamWithHim - Interesting that you had issues with your OnTap migration. Usually that is an indication of either a customer trying to do it themselves and not knowing what they are doing or a partner doing it and not knowing what they are doing. Clustered Data On Tap is different than 7-mode due to the cluster layer in between the controllers and the network that you have to configure. Think of it like the difference between configuring VMWare if it had a vSwitch (Cluster DataOnTap) and VMWare without a vSwitch (7-mode). That isn't exactly how it works, but the concept is the same, if you don’t configure the vSwitch, you can have issues. This is easy for someone not familiar with Clustered Data on Tap to misconfigure. Clustered Data On Tap migrations are not that complicated if someone knows what they are doing. The data migration portion of the task isn't any different than any other data migration, so just like anything else, this should be pretty straightforward for someone who knows what they are doing. There isn't anything that complicated in the process that would make it fail.

      Regarding not having synchronous replication, Clustered data OnTap is a work in progress just like any new code level. Synchronous Replication is not something most customers use because they either do not have the bandwidth to do it or their hot site is outside of the maximum distance limitation of 200 kilometers (km) or 124 miles for synchronous replication on a lightly loaded system with a fat expensive pipe and the practical distance for synchronous replication for a busy system is about 35km to 50km or 20 miles to 30 miles which is a boundary for any vendor. Net is since it is used by very few customers, it simply wasn't at the top of the priority list.

      On the other hand, the features that practically all NetApp customers use every day and what make NetApp special like deduplication, Compression, Multi-Protocol support, SnapManager tools etc. are in there because most customers use those all day every day so they received a higher priority in the development cycle. While EMC and HDS may have synchronous replication, they still don't have many of the features that NetApp does. So while one can cherry pick one thing that NetApp doesn't have. There is a list of things that NetApp has that most vendors do not. Let’s consider VMAX for example, EMC's most expensive platform, typically 2x the cost of a like configured NetApp, doesn't have deduplication, NFS, CIFs, SMB3.0, FlashCache/FastCache, Low Overhead Snapshots, hot swappable shelves, High Performance RAID-6, there is no data-in-place upgrade path from VMAX 10K to VMAX 20K to VMAX 40K. etc. Yes I cherry picked the VMAX compared to the FAS in this case, but that is my point, you can cherry pick features here and there all day long which is what you did picking one feature, synchronous mirroring, which few people use anyway, to try to make your point that there is something wrong with Clustered Data OnTap.

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